Glenn Reynolds Channels Jack Benny

We have heard everyone — from Obama’s own debt commission to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — call the looming debt a mortal threat to the nation. We have watched Greece self-immolate. We can see the future. The only question has been: When will the country finally rouse itself?
Amazingly, the answer is now. Led by famously progressive Wisconsin — Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level — a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?

I’m thinking, I’m thinking!

Do read all of Krauthammer’s great piece. Here is another excerpt:

Hence the import of the current moment — its blinding clarity. Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang onto the gains of their glory years — from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking.
Obama’s Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no.

No doubt I’m dating myself when I say that Jack Benny is still my favorite comedian. Not to say that there is no good comedy these days; I think Modern Family, for example, is hilarious. But of what comedian since Jack Benny could anyone say, with a straight face, that he was also a great American? And Benny was the anti-Al Franken, a comedian whose humor didn’t come from suppressed rage at his audience.
Plus, he was just very funny. The ten seconds that precede the line Glenn quotes are the funniest ten seconds of silence in history.